System overload this week at The Film Shooters Collective headquarters. It’s really difficult to stay caught up with so much going on, and everything we’re working on. Here’s what’s new this week with the FSC.

On the Blog

On our blog this week we’re talking about $40 cameras. A bunch of people from all over the web came to contribute words and photos and the result is really beautiful. You’d be surprised by how many great cameras are out there and what people are shooting with them. Here’s a few of my favorites from that post. You can check out the whole post here.

A couple of the pillars of our community, Amy Jasek and Ruby Falls, came together to come up with the Collective Inspiration Challenge. The goal is to show how we inspire one another and how we’re using community to take our photography further. They’re doing some really cool stuff, and you can check out the first installment here.

Uneven Development

A few days ago I had a total disaster with a roll of TMAX 400 B&W film and Xtol 1:1. The result was bright surge marks on every frame. After reading many opinions that ranged from over agitation to under agitation, I decided that I couldn’t isolate one specific thing that I was doing wrong, but that I needed to really start from the beginning. This post summarizes what I learned using TMAX 400 and Xtol 1:1.

— Nancy Lehrer

Our private Facebook group has been abuzz with issues of uneven development lately. First with my own negatives, and then with those of Nancy Lehrer. You can read all about her issues with uneven development here, and I’ll be posting about my conversation with Ilford in the next few weeks.

Also on Facebook, one of our members Greg Williamson posted this great Nobuyoshi Araki quote in our private Facebook group:

“…each time I write the word “love”, it comes out looking different. If I write it a lot it begins to look like a new word, and I doubt if it’s even the word “love” anymore. And this feeling is similar to what I feel when I take photographs. Or it’s like a woman you love. She’s the same person everyday but she’s also different. These two feelings, her being the same forever, and changing every moment- between this back-and-forth movement is where photography occurs.

When I write, the materials I use change according to my mood. Whether I use a brush and ink, a magic marker, a ballpoint pen- it all depends on the mood. And this the same when choosing what camera to use, too. Maybe I’ll choose a compact camera with a date-imprint function or a 6x7 camera on a tripod. It’s all very similar. “